1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to business suite customization, and in particular, to a user feedback method and system for business suite customization.
2. Description of the Related Art
A business suite is a collection of a suit of business software functions for business process management, which provides business process support for enterprises or organizations. The business suite is developed typically in a uniform manner, i.e., the business suite is designed for a certain kind of user group or for a certain industrial domain. This enables repeated use of the same business requirements because certain user groups or users in a certain industrial domain have the most probability of having the same business requirement. Since different users have different skills, preferences, needs and goals, the business suite software requires customization. The existing business suites generally provide some core components capable of satisfying basic requirements in advance, and then different customization needs are collected during the process when enterprise customers utilize the business suite, to perform customization.
In the prior art, the customization mainly is performed in two ways. One way is through interviewing, i.e., the enterprise user introduces business logic to the business suite developer, the developer introduces the current state of the business suite and creates customization requirement according to the business logic provided by the enterprise user, and after the both parties come to an agreement, the developer performs customization on the business suite. This process is time-consuming. At the same time, since the customization requirements do not exist in advance, both parties are required to come to a common understanding on the enterprise business logic and the business suite state, to effectively perform customization. In fact, the enterprise user and the developer usually have some differences in understanding, so that the customization cannot be effectively performed. The other way is that the enterprise user provides comments or makes demands during the trial and testing phase of the business suite, by common communication mechanisms, such as telephone, email, instant message and so on, or by a built-in user feedback mechanism (since the comments and the requirements concern the customization of the business suite, they are collectively referred to as customization requirement). This process is also time-consuming, and meanwhile, since there are a lot of enterprise users, the developer has to deal with various customization requirements from a large number of enterprise users, and understand the inter-relationship among these requirements before performing customization.